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RV F CONGRESS 

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St. Louis Engineer's Club, 



ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. 



December 17, 1890 



From the JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIA TION OF 

ENGINEERING SOCIETIES. 






FEB 24 it J 



ST. LOUIS. 



Address by Francis E. Nipher. Retiring President of the 
Engineers' Club of St. Louis. 



[Read December 17th, 1890.] 

It seems appropriate at this time to give a brief account of the progress 
and present condition of electric industries 111 our city. 

The first commercial lighting that might fairly be called successful, was 
inaugurated by Charles Heisler in 1878 at Conrad's brewery. Alternating- 
currents were used in operating arc lamps. Later he adopted a series sys- 
tem of incandescent lighting, still using alternating currents. 

In England the general impression still seems to be that incandescent 
lamps cannot be successfully operated on long lines without the use of con- 
verters and an alternating multiple system. Such was the general opinion 
in this country until Mr. Heisler pushed boldly into the fieid and finally 
operated 50 miles of line wire from one dynamo. The Heisler Company, 
of this city manufacture only central station plants, of which about 70 
have been established. The largest plant of about 5,000 16-candle lamps, 
is operated by the Municipal Electric Lighting Co. in this city. The total 
capacity of the plants established by this company is about equivalent to 
60,000 16-candle lamps. These lamps require 5 amperes, 14 volts, and are 
said to yield 32 candles with a life of 600 hours. 

The Municipal Electric Light and Power Co., which began street illum- 
ination May 1, 1890, are now operating 3,300 arc lamps of the Wood pat- 
tern, each lamp requiring 9.6 amperes, 47 volts. Of these lamps 1,400 are 
furnished to private customers. 



**! ,*x\ 



These lamps are operated in 61 circuits, the longest of which is 2 1 
miles and carries 60 lights. The total length of the lines is about 1,000 
miles, the most distant lamps being 10 miles from the power house. The 
company has 7060-light and 12 30-light dynamos of the Wood-Gramme 
pattern, furnished by the Fort Wayne Co. The area covered by then- 
lines is about 50 square miles and the area actually illuminated is about 
30 square miles. The power is furnished by six 600 horse power engines 
and six high speed engines of about 75 horse power. The total energy 
output of the plant is about 36,000 horse power-hours per day. 

The steam supply system is in duplicate throughout. Independent of 
this double system of steam supply is an independent connection for 1,500 
horse power to be used during the day when the loads are light. 

The same company operates a Heisler incandescent plant, developing 
the equivalent of 5,000 16-candle lamps on 150 miles of line wire. At 
this station four high speed engines are used, with a total capacity of 700 
horse power. 

The Laclede Gaslight Co. also operate a Heisler plant of 814 32- 
candle lamps, each requiring 5 amperes, 14 volts. These lamps are used 
in alley lighting. These are operated in four circuits from two dynamos, 
of which the longest line is 26.5 miles; the shortest 16. 1 miles. The total 
length of the four circuits is 86.4 miles and the area lighted is four square 
miles. For indoor lighting, the Laclede Co. operate a Brush alterna- 
ting system with converters, of which the longest line is 14. 1 miles. 
These circuits are also four in number with a total length of 35.3 miles. 
The system employs 41 conveiters with a capacity ot 1,245 16-candle 
lamps. 

The power is obtained from two triple expansion Williams engines, 
having each a capacity of 250 horse power, and one single cylinder West- 
inghouse engine of 45 horse power. 

There are in all at this plant two 1,000-light, three of 900-light and 
one 650-light dynamos, making a total capacity of 5,350 lights. 

The Missouri Electric Light and Power Co. began operations Aug. 1, 
1889, operating the Westinghouse system. They now have about 1255 
converters in use as follows: 

100 10-light converters 1,000 Lights. 

500 20-light " 10,000 " 

250 30-light " 7,5°° " 

400 40-light " 16,000 " 

5 100-light " 500 " 



35,000 
In November, 1890, the average number of lamps in operation during 
lightest loads was 3,000 16-candle lamps. During heaviest loads the num- 
ber was 16,000 or not quite half the capacity. There are now 20 feeders 
leading from the station, the longest of which is five miles in length. 
There are eight 3,000-light dynamos, each capable of delivering 150 am- 
peres at 1,000 volts terminal potential, and an additional dynamo of the 
same capacity will be added during the present month. 



The Missouri Company also operate 150 miles of alley lamps, requir- 
ing about half the capacity of one of the dynamos. These lights arc 
run in a series-multiple system, twenty 50-volt lamps being connected in 
series between mains at a potential difference of 1,000 volts. There are 
700 of these lights on 35 lines, between three mains, and covering an area 
of about 12 square miles. 

There are now in operation eight 300-horse power Westinghouse en- 
gines, seven of which are required at the time of heaviest load, when the 
indicated horse power was in November last, on the average about 1650. 

During July, 1890, the indicated horse power hours per day was 1 1,040 
and during the following November it was 19,800. 

There are about 50 isolated electric lighting plants in St. Louis, having 
in all about 27,000 lights, and representing about 2,700 horse power. The 
cost of these plants is on the average $9 per lamp, or $243,000. Of these 
plants 38, representing 22,135 lamps, have been installed by the Edison 
Co. The largest plants are the Edison plant in the Exposition building, 
which has 5,000 lamps, and the United States plant at the Custom House, 
which has 1,930 lamps. 

The Union Depot Railroad Co. are now operating fourteen miles ot 
double track by electricity, using a Thomson-Houston plant. At present 
eight compound dynamos are in use, each capable of delivering 150 am- 
peres at 500 volts terminal potential. When complete, twenty-two dyna- 
mos will be used, making 2,200 horse power in all. 

At present 24 motor cars are run during light traffic and 34 motors and 
trail cars are used during the heavy traffic in morning and evening. The 
number of cars will be considerably increased in the near future in order 
to provide for the increasing traffic. 

During heavy traffic with 34 cars the power required is at the rate of 10 
horse power per car, and during light loads the power required is 6 horse 
power per car. The number of horse power hours per day is about 7,350. 
The plant is supplied with four Hamilton-Corliss engines with rated 
capacity of 250, 350 and two of 500 horse power. At present one 500 horse 
power engine will operate the entire road. 

The Lindell Railway Company are also introducing the use of electric- 
ity. At present 22 cars are being operated by electricity, and in a few 
days the entire road of about 33 miles of single track will be in operation. 
It is reported that when completed the number of cars will be 67. I was 
however, unable to obtain any definite information concerning the opera- 
tions of this road. 

It is interesting to turn from such extensive and important industries in- 
volving the outlay of millions of dollars and furnishing employment to an 
army of men, to the humble and unobtrusive beginning of all these splen- 
did things. 

On Sept. 22, 183 1, Faraday wrote in his laboratory note book as follows: 
"I have had an iron ring made (soft iron), iron round and ft of an inch 
thick, and ring six inches in external diameter. Wound many coils of 
copper round, one half of the coil being separated by twine and calico. 
There w r ere three lengths of wire, each about 24 feet long, and they could 



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be connected as one length or as separate lengths. By trial of a trough, 
each was insulated from the other. We will call this side of the ring A. 
On the other side, but separated by an interval, was wound wire in two 
pieces, together amounting to about 60 feet in length, the direction being 
as with the other coils. This side call B. 

Charged a battery of ten plates, four inches square, made the coil on 
B side one coil and connected its extremities by a copper wire passing to 
a distance and just over a magnetic needle (three feet from wire ring.) 
Then connected the ends of one of the pieces on A side with the battery; 
immediately a sensible effect on needle. It oscillated and settled at last 
in original position. On breaking connection of A side with the battery, 
again a disturbance of the needle." 

Later he varied the experiment and writes: 

"In place of the indicating helix our galvanometer was used, and then 
a sudden jerk was perceived when battery communication was made and 
broken, but it was so slight as to be scarcely visible. It was one way when 
made and the other way when broken, and the needle took up its natural 
position at intermediate times." 

The device which Faraday describes was a transformer. The impulses 
which he saw in the needle were due to induced currents. He was at once 
led on to the invention of the first dynamo, which he constructed during 
the same month. But if any person had asked Faraday what practical 
use could be made of his discovery, he would have been utterly unable to 
make a satisfactory reply. The effects were so small that it was with dif- 
ficulty that they could be seen. The forces were utterly insignificant. 
Who would then have imagined that these feeble impulses would some day 
be pumped through wires to light large cities and to move heavy cars 
loaded down with passengers? Who would have believed that articulate 
speech would ever be transmitted by them? Had any prophet fortold all 
this at that time, it would have been called the idle fancy of a useless 
brain. And yet these great things at once became possible when Faraday 
made those simple experiments. They have all followed directly from 
these discoveries. Probably nothing since the invention of the wagon 
wheel is destined to have a more profound effect upon the civilization of 
mankind. 

At the present time the proposition to illuminate a large city by elec- 
tricity would hardly be considered the dream of an enthusiast. It would 
be hard now to find an intelligent man so conservative that he would 
pronounce such a plan commercially impossible. 

Eleven years ago eminent gentlemen who were in a position to know 
most about the merits of the project, and who were anxious to avoid mak- 
ing mistakes; who were also anxious (for a consideration) to prevent peo- 
ple from making foolish investments, were nearly all of an opposite opin- 
ion. Dynamos had indeed been built in abundance, but they could not 
be depended upon to maintain even the few lamps which they operated. 
The light was fitful, the service was uncertain. Something was always 
going wrong; and as for the enthusiasm which was everywhere manifest 
among the people, and the proprietors of dynamo machines, it was pointed 



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out that forty years before the inventors had precipitated a similar period 
of crazy excitement, and nothing had come of it. 

It is certainly a bad omen if those who are in a position to know most 
about any project, pronounce it a hopeless case. They are generally right. 
In that event they seldom get credit for their wisdom, and the promoters 
of the schemes which they properly extinguish are always left with a feel- 
ing that the failure was due to the opposition of those who should have 
given support. 

But the judgment of the competent is sometimes at fault and it was 
so in the matter of municipal electric lighting. It was left to men whose 
knowledge of the difficulties to be met was so limited that they were not 
aware of the magnitude of the problem, to do most of the drudgery and 
bear the burdens of the pioneer work. 

Nor were these difficulties believed to be wholly of a kind that could 
be overcome by the ingenuity of man. The distinguished electrician of 
the English post service, now a well-known electrical engineer, Mr. W. 
H. Preece, in the January number of the Philosophical Magazi)ic for 
1879, gave a mathematical discussion of the problem of electric lighting. 
In this paper he showed, apparently to the satisfaction of everybody, that 
we were struggling against a law of nature. Mr. Preece assumed a given 
dynamo or battery having a limited or fixed electro-motive force. He 
assumed lamps to be connected either in series or in multiple. As the 
number of lamps increased, he showed that in either case the system soon 
approached and reached a condition where the power that could be ex- 
pended on the lamp system would vary inversely as the number of lamps. 
The power expended in each lamp would then vary inversely as the square 
of the number of lamps. 

This state of affairs is brought about in the series system, by the condi- 
tion that the resistance of the lamp system is directly proportional to the 
number of lamps. The increasing resistance enfeebles the current. When 
the resistance of the lamp system has become so large that the dynamo 
resistance is inappreciable, then the effect of doubling the number of 
lamps is to divide the current by two. The current enters to the second 
power in the expression for electrical energy, so that energy and power 
per lamp are divided by four. 

On the other hand, in the multiple system, an increase in the number 
of lamps diminishes the resistance of the lamp system. When this resist- 
ance becomes insignificant compared with that of the dynamo, the power 
is all expended in heating the dynamo. Mr. Preece gave the electric 
illuminators a parting blow by saying that the case was even worse than 
he had painted it, as he had said nothing of the power wasted in the con- 
ductors, or the heat required to bring the carbons up to a temperature of 
incandescence. He concludes as follows: 

"We have assumed W (the total power of the dynamo) to be constant; 
but this is only the case when a certain limit is reached, and when the 
velocity of the rotating coils in the dynamo machine has attained a maxi- 
mum. This limit will vary with each dynamo machine, and each kind 
of lamp used. With the Wallace-Farmer machine the limit appears to 



be reached when six lamps are connected up in series. With the Gramme 
alternating machine and Jabloschkoff candles, the limit appears to be five 
lamps. Beyond these limits the above laws will be true. It is this partial 
success in multiplying the light, that has led so many sanguine experi- 
mentors to anticipate the ultimate possibility of its extensive subdivision, 
— a possibility which this demonstration shows to be hopeless, and which 
experiment has proved to be fallacious." 

These conclusions obtained wide currency for about a year. While 
reading the paper of Mr. Preece with a view of making an exposition of 
the matter in a lecture, it occurred to me that the conditions assumed by 
Mr. Preece were not necessary — that, in fact, a series-multiple arrange- 
ment of lamps might be made and the resistance of the lamp system thus 
made independent of the number of lamps. It also seemed to me that 
dynamos might be coupled in multiple or in series, and although I then 
wrote the equations and drew the efficiency curves for such a plant, I did 
not publish the results. I had had no practical experience with dynamos, 
and was not sure that they would operate when connected together like 
battery cells. 

The publication of the series-multiple arrangement for a lamp system 
put an end to the idea that had gained currency on the publication of 
Mr. Preece's paper. The system of alley lighting used by the Westing- 
house company in this city, is, so far as the arrangement of lamps is con- 
cerned, exactly the one which was shown to be possible in my paper of 
Dec. 31, 1879. 

As we now look back on the crude ideas that we all held in the early 
days of electric lighting, it seems incredible that so much labor, and such 
vast sums of money should have been expended in learning what seems so 
plain and simple now. 

There was no error in the equations of Mr. Preece. His conclusions 
seemed to be justified by what was then known, but as Mr. Huxley has 
said, "the grist one gets from a mathematical mill, depends upon what 
one puts into it." The fact is we are doing exactly what Mr. Preece said 
was hopeless; but in a somewhat different way from the ones then in his 
mind. We have self-regulating dynamos, which within certain limits will 
maintain constant currents through the lamps as lamps are switched in 
and out; and the capacity of dynamos is now ten times as great as in 1879. 
Still these dynamos can be overloaded, and they will then behave just as 
Mr. Preece said they would. On account of the increased capacity of dy- 
namos it is not as serious a matter as Mr. Preece thought it would be to 
finish the task by the duplication of dynamos. 

During the whole progress of the electrical industry, it has been most 
instructive to see how some new improvement has sometimes changed the 
whole aspect of affairs, as when reserve troops are thrown into a doubtful 
contest. Plans and machinery which the prudent and conservative engi- 
neer had decided to be valueless, came then to the front, and the struggle 
of contending interests began on new ground and along new lines. 

For example, Faraday invented the transformer or converter in 1831. 
It was an iron ring upon which his primary and secondary wires were 



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wound. Ruhmkorfi and Ritchie in their well-known induction coils, 
showed how to convert a large current of low potential into a small cur- 
rent of high potential, and at the same time used a laminated core com- 
posed of a bundle of iron wires. 

Then it was discovered that the induction coil is reversible, and that a 
small current of high potential can be converted into a large current of 
low potential. 

It is interesting to observe that in 1883 the U. S. Patent Office refused 
a patent to Bernstein for a converter, on the ground that he could not 
possibly get out of the converter on the secondary wire, a larger current 
than he put into it on the primary. In 1886 the same office gave Gaulard 
and Gibbs a patent for the same device,* the impossible having mean- 
while become possible. Then came the great step of placing the iron 
around the primary and secondary coils, instead of within them. This 
was what brought it to the front as the powerful ally of the alternate cur- 
rent dynamo which then became the formidable competitor of the 
secondary battery. 

In a similar way the work of Dr. Wellington Adams of this city 
on the equipment of electric motor cars brought about a complete 
revolution in their construction. When his paper read before this 
club April 23, 1884, was published, the building of electric locomotives 
like those of Siemens and Edison wholly ceased. The entire subsequent 
development of the electric railway has proceeded along the lines which 
Dr. Adams laid down. The application of the power directly to individual 
car axles, centering the motor and its gearing upon the axle, so that different 
axles may move independently without deranging the gearing, the pro- 
vision for the oscillation of the field on the car axle as an axis, while held in 
position by elastic resistance, all this was fust done in our city, and was 
first proclaimed to the public by Dr. Adams in a meeting of this club. 

Over and over again have we learned that we should have a watchful 
eye upon those things which have jno practical value. Students and engi- 
neers alike are prone to ignore with systematic deliberation, those things 
which have no commercial value . But the history of scientific discovery 
and of engineering progress is simply a history of the work of men who 
applied their brains to useless things and made them useful; who success- 
fully did what had been considered hopeless or had been overlooked as 
worthless. 

In Compte's Positive Philosophy a rather positive statement is made to 
the effect that while the forms and distances of the heavenly bodies might 
be determined, "we can never know anything of their chemical or miner- 
alogical condition." What Compte doubtless had in mind was that chem- 
ists would never get their hands on any samples of these bodies for treat- 
ment in test-tubes. But something unexpected happened. Physics came 
to the aid of chemistry, and star analysis became possible without the ne- 
cessity of carting specimens to Paris. 

It must be confessed, however, that this kind of work — the doing of 



*Thompson's Dynamo electric Machinery. 



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''impossible" things — is not for all men. Within rifle shot from this place 
there are men who are trying to execute the plan, of driving a dynamo by 
a steam engine the steam for which is to be produced from heat developed 
by the driven dynamo. No amount of explanation can make such people 
understand why this is impossible, or that the combination would be abso- 
lutely devoid of commercial value, even if it could be made to succeed to 
perfection. 

Nor do I wish to ignore the fact that the commercial instincts of man- 
kind should be considered, in deciding what is to be undertaken. No com- 
pany of business men should be willing to expend all of their capital in 
convincing themselves that the undertaking might have succeeded, if they 
had had a few more millions of capital and a few hundred years of time. 

It is not an easy thing to draw the line between the cranks and the en- 
gineers. Different people draw the line in different places. It is a matter 
of individual judgment. Time and the march of events have frequently 
made it necessary to revise or reverse such judgments. We pass by im- 
perceptible stages from the well-marked engineering lunatic, who is try- 
ing to make an engine or a dynamo drive itself, and who seems to have an 
idea that it will also be able to drive anything and everything else in the 
universe that needs driving, to the man who believes he can operate street- 
cars or illuminate great cities by electricity; that he can telegraph through 
ocean cables and drive ships and railway cars by steam. 

Fortunately or unfortunately, men do often make mistakes in deciding 
what they should undertake. They spend their lives or their fortunes in 
trying to do things before the times are ripe, and while the difficulties are 
too great. They achieve only a partial success, which commercially is no 
success, and those who follow them, enjoy the benefits of their labor, and 
finally not only reap the pecuniary reward but monopolize all of the glory. 

The data concerning the electric plants has been kindly furnished by Messrs. 
Emerson McMillen of the Laclede Gas Light Co., John Scullen of the Union Depot 
Railway Co., S. M. Dodds of the Missouri Electric Light and Power Co., and James I. 
Ayers of the Municipal Electric Light and Power Company. Mr. E. F. Horn, Agent 
of the Edison Co. furnished most of the data concerning isolated plants. To all of 
these gentlemen I am indebted for many courtesies. F. E.N. 



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